Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Today's California Roundup - Jimmy Carter Urges Yes on 34

The process for administering the death penalty in the United States
is broken beyond repair, and it is time to choose a more effective and
moral alternative. California voters will have the opportunity to do
this on election day.

Although our government has a fundamental
responsibility to protect its citizens, there is little evidence that
the death penalty acts as a strong deterrent to murder and other violent
crimes. One recent study found that 88% of the nation's leading
criminologists believe that swift and certain punishment is the best
deterrent. The death penalty is neither swift nor certain, with the
appeals process in California lasting an average of 25 years. Most
inmates who are sentenced to death instead die of old age.

And:

Some devout Christians, particularly Protestants, are fervent
advocates of the death penalty. This view contradicts the teachings of Jesus Christ
and misinterprets Holy Scripture, with its numerous examples of mercy.
We should remember how God forgave Cain, who killed Abel. He also
forgave the adulterer King David, who had Bathsheba's husband killed.
Jesus forgave an adulterous woman sentenced to be stoned to death and
explained away the "eye for an eye" scripture. The Catholic Church has
officially condemned the death penalty, as have the United Methodist
Church, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, Reform
Judaism and many other religious denominations .

Perhaps the
strongest argument against the death penalty, though, is its extreme
bias against the poor, minorities and those with diminished mental
capacity. Although homicide victims are six times more likely to be
black rather than white, 77% of death penalty cases involve white
victims. It is hard to imagine a rich white person going to the death
chamber after being defended by expensive lawyers. We shouldn't allow a
system to continue that places a higher value on the lives of white
Americans.

Californians have the opportunity to replace this
wasteful, immoral and discriminatory system with a mandatory sentence of
life without the possibility of parole. I urge them to vote yes on
Proposition 34.

My entire professional life has been entwined with the death penalty.
As a prosecutor, I asked for the death penalty. As a judge, I imposed
it. As a citizen, I will vote next month to retain it as a punishment
option in California.

I have often encountered the argument that
the death penalty is not a deterrent because it did not deter someone
from carrying out a particular murder. But the actual issue is a larger
one: Would there have been more murders in California without its
deterrent effect? That's a hard question to answer with certainty, of
course, but there has been considerable research to suggest the death
penalty is a significant deterrent.

Ron McAndrew, a former prison warden, said he began to have doubts
about the death penalty after seeing flames dance from the head of an
inmate strapped into Florida's electric chair.

"There was no way I
could stop the execution," said McAndrew, who was in charge of the
electrocution that night in 1997. Smoke and a putrid odor filled the
death chamber as the witnesses outside watched, agape. "I had to let it
go on for 11 minutes."

McAndrew, 74, was one of two former
executioners who came to California this week to tell tales from the
death chamber during a four-day tour of some of the state's most
conservative communities: Riverside, Bakersfield and Fresno.

And:

Jerry Givens, 59, who worked on Virginia's execution team, told
audiences he presided over 62 executions — 25 electrocutions and 37
lethal injections — out of duty and a strong belief in the death
penalty.

He said his misgivings about execution began when former
Virginia death row inmate Earl Washington Jr. was exonerated. Givens had
come within two weeks of executing Washington. "It would have been with
me for the rest of my life," he said.

The Yes on 34 campaign has embraced a heavy social media strategy, using
Twitter to interact, engage, and inform California Voters from the
account @SAFECalifornia. The
1,000+ following is showcased frequently on the page with retweets and
responses coming from the Yes of 34 manager. The account also taps into
their audience by thanking supporters for their part in ending the death
penalty, sharing videos and images, and tweeting out polls and
statistics.

On the other side, the No on 34 campaign has yet to create an active
Twitter account, ignoring the importance of an online strategy in an era
where more than 80% of eligible voters are online. While tweeting frequently, the VoteNO34 campaign has few interactions with followers. The account has under 100 followers.

The justifications given by death penalty opponents who have embraced
life without parole reveal the extent to which abolitionists have
surrendered the moral basis of their position. It used to be that
abolitionists argued that most people who commit bad acts can change and
that the cruelest punishment one can inflict is to rob a human being of
hope. But this concept—I hesitate to use the word “rehabilitation”—has
seeped out of the criminal justice system over the past forty years.
Prisons are now designed almost entirely for security in mind and not at
all for socialization. Sentences have gotten steadily longer. And while
states are turning away from the death penalty, they are replacing it
with a different kind of death sentence. Sending a prisoner to die
behind bars with no hope of release is a sentence that denies the
possibility of redemption every bit as much as strapping a murderer to
the gurney and filling him with poison.

Opponents of capital punishment often point out that the United
States is the only developed Western country still executing prisoners, a
comparison meant to shame us for being aligned with such human
rights–violating countries as Iran, China and North Korea. It’s not a
bad argument, but exactly the same could be said about life without
parole. Our neighbors to the south don’t have it. Almost all of Europe
rejects it. Even China and Pakistan, hardly exemplars of progressive
criminal justice policy, allow prisoners serving life sentences to come
up for parole after twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the United States
imprisons wrongdoers for sentences that are five to seven times longer
than sentences for comparable offenses in, say, Germany. Yet the
recidivism rate in Germany is roughly 25 percent lower than ours.

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.